Christina was a pretty good student but never finished high school. It didn’t seem relevant to her life so she wandered away from her education. No one really noticed. She worked a few dead-end jobs that held little promise of a good future to her, so those did not last long.

She is now 19, a mother to a one-year-old and lives with her parents. Christina has quickly grown up, and has renewed energy to take care of her own life and that of her child; she dreams of finishing her education and finding a meaningful career. Unfortunately, her parents’ work schedules and health issues prevent them from providing childcare, so she can’t get away from home. The way childcare support laws are written, Christina does not qualify (her parents' income, while low, is just over the threshold for benefits), even though childcare is exactly what she needs now to finish school and start working. Ideally, she would like to obtain her GED while working an entry-level job in a career she is interested in, but this path to self-sufficiency isn’t available to her either, due to the complex laws that govern who can get employment supports and what benefits are available to young people in her position.

“Christina” is not a real person, but her experiences are all too real. She is an example of one of the nearly 5 million 16- to 24-year-olds in the US who are neither in work or school – a group known as “opportunity youth.” Most of these young people want to reconnect to work or education, but as a nation, we don’t make it easy for them. At the very point that they get motivated, the federal and state support programs that are supposed to help them re-engage can hinder, rather than help, in their success.

At the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions we work with community collaborations across the US that are focused on building and deepening education and employment pathways for opportunity youth like Christina.

Based on interviews with organizations serving young adults and drawing down federal funds for workforce training and education, our new report, Opportunity Lost? Maximizing Large Federal Funds to Support Opportunity Youth investigates the ways federal funds for education, workforce, and other vital supports for low-income families are not working well together to meet the needs of opportunity youth. Based on the real experiences of young people and the community organizations trying valiantly to serve them, it looks at how we might adjust some federal programs so that more young people can be helped.

Providers report that young people most commonly need these four supports as they re-engage with school and work:

Case management support to reduce specific life barriers (aside from employment/income support), the most common and significant of which are stable housing, childcare, transportation, and access to food.

Our report looks at four large funding streams focused on workforce entry (WIOA and SNAP Education and Training), educational attainment (WIOA and Pell Grants) and basic supports (TANF) – and how they can, and can’t, be combined to meet the needs listed above. A byzantine system of federal, state, and local regulations govern how providers can use these funds, and who can use them. These rules and local practices dramatically reduce the impact these funding streams could have.

The good news is that change is possible, and there are communities starting at the local level to make change happen. In fact, communities are finding that many of these regulations are changeable at the local level without the need for state or federal law change. Still, others are applying for, and getting, waivers to federal and state regulations so that they can better serve young people.

As young people emerge from disconnection and are motivated to re-engage in education and work, we have an opportunity to improve their futures – and to enhance their communities, their children’s lives, and our whole nation’s prospects. To be clear: the current federal funding programs to support opportunity youth are not sufficiently funded to re-engage 5 million young people (and recent estimates show that federal support is decreasing, rather than increasing in this area). In addition to increasing funding, however, we owe it to our young people to fix the mess we’ve created around how existing funding can be used and combined. We hope that Opportunity Lost? Maximizing Large Federal Funds to Support Opportunity Youth will inspire communities and local policymakers to take a fresh look at their workforce and education funding options, and imagine a new way of supporting our nation’s future.

Ken Thompson is an independent philanthropic sector consultant and a Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions. He can be followed on Twitter @kensbrain.

Ken Thompson is a Senior Fellow at the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions (AFCS), and is the owner of Ken Thompson Consulting, a Seattle-based philanthropic-sector consultancy. Ken supports multi-sector collaboratives and individual funders to think strategically and desig...